Collaborative idea generation for ELT

On Sunday, Milada Krajewska and I were looking for the amazing playphrase.me, which Anthony Schmidt had introduced to me a couple of months ago and I’d forgotten the name of. It’s a kind of audio corpus, where you can search for a particular word or phrase and it will find a series of examples from films and TV shows. It’s designed for language learners, and you can also help them to add to their database of phrases. Here’s an example for ‘if you know what I mean‘:

In the process, we came across Yarn, another tool to find video clips by quote. The interface isn’t as good as playphrase, the clips aren’t always cut smoothly and you have to manually select the next clip. However, if you choose carefully, it could work well for dictations practising connected speech, especially because each video is on a loop until you stop it. Here’s the same phrase, ‘if you know what I mean‘, on Yarn:

What would you do with these two tools in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

At IATEFL 2015 I learnt about The role of the image in materials design from Ceri Jones and Ben Goldstein. One of the sources they recommended following was Unsplash, who send out a selection of photos to your email every week, all of which are available under a Creative Commons 0 license, meaning they can be used for free without requesting permission first. The photos are always beautiful, and I found this one particularly striking.

What would you do with this image in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context it is used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

The BBC gave a crane driver a camera to film his commute to the cab of his crane, then show what he does every day. It’s something I’ve often wondered about, and I found the thought very interesting – I don’t think I could do that job! If you’re in the UK, you can find the link here. Outside the UK, you need to go via the Britain homepage. [If someone could send me the exact link, that would be great!]

What would you do with this video and article in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

A series of posters with the tagline ‘I am an immigrant’ has recently appeared on the London Underground, courtesy of the Movement Against Xenophobia. The money to display the posters was crowdfunded, and the whole campaign is a response to the often negative messages conveyed about immigrants in the run-up to the UK elections in May 2015. You can read more about the campaign on the I am an immigrant website, where the image above was taken from.

What would you do with these posters in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

What would you do with this article in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context it is used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!) It seems ripe for classroom use, with lots of ideas immediately jumping to mind, but I’d love to hear what you’d do with it first!

Poster designed by Anjana Iyer (click to see all of her posters – no copyright infringement is intended)

Found in Translation is a series of posters by Anjana Iyer. She aimed to illustrate words which cannot be translated into English word-for-word. I think the results are beautiful. There are 100 of them as part of a 100 days project run by artists.

What would you do with these posters in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

What would you do with a lunch box in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context it is used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

Esther Honig is a human interest reporter. As part of a project called ‘Before and After’, she sent the image above to photo editors around the world, along with a simple request: “Make me look beautiful”. The results are a fascinating insight into what ‘beautiful’ really means around the world. You can see all of the images on Honig’s website.

What would you do with these photos in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context they are used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

Lead

That’s it.
What would you do with this word in your classroom? You can make any assumptions you like about the context it is used in. Post your ideas in the comments below. All ideas are welcome (there are no wrong answers!)

#eltpics

#eltpics is a collection of photos, based on a weekly theme, taken by ELT teachers, trainers and writers from around the world.
These are, in turn, available free to others in the field of ELT under a CC license to use in their classroom and on their non-commercial materials.
Anyone interested in joining in can tweet an image with the hashtag #eltpics, and it will then be added to the #eltpics Flickr group.
For a more detailed explanation of how to join in, please see this post.
For ideas on how to use some of the photos, visit the eltpics blog.
You can see the last 10 photos uploaded to the site below: